5. Call for accountability. Ask Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other human rights organizations to document and denounce the April 2, 2016 Talish war crimes by Azerbaijan’s army, during which an Armenian couple was executed and had their ears chopped off (source: (http://hetq.am/…/azerbaijani-soldiers-execute-elderly-armen…)

6. Organize protests. Peaceful and pro-peace protests should be organized in front of Azerbaijani embassies and consulates, or local government buildings.

7. Condemn pro-Baku activities. If your governor or legislature has expressed support for Azerbaijan (by issuing a statement or proclamation), or a company headquartered in your city has signed a contract with Azerbaijan, protest the cooperation and explain that it has emboldened a bloody dictatorship to commit more crimes.

A friend of mine just introduced me to an Armenian band established Beirut called “Garabala” and I just can’t stop listening to their latest video on YouTube, “Garabala” is an acoustic band reviving Armenian folk music in its own unique way. The band does not compose their own music yet , however they strive to mix different styles to revive and modernize old Armenian songs. Most of their repertoire revolves around Armenian folk music, but they also embrace other cultures by including Tsigane, Jazz and other styles in their musical arrangements. you can follow them on Facebook here and subscribe to their YouTube channel here

It is now common knowledge that 80 percent of the world’s ethnic Armenians, somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million, were wiped out between 1915 and 1917 when their government, ruled by Ottoman Turks, decided to erase the Armenians. A wealth of research in the last decade has brought to light the extent and the severity of this organized “campaign of race extermination,” and thanks to the work of writers like Taner Akcam, Peter Balakian and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, the truth is slowly emerging. What has become clear is that the Ottoman Turks made an organized effort to erase not only the Armenians but every trace of Armenian culture from the face of the earth.

They Failed !

The surviving Armenians, known as the Armenian diaspora, scattered themselves around the globe. When my family, like many, arrived in their new homeland, photos, documents, and artifacts from the old country were scarce. So some of them got together and drew maps — as best they could from memory — showing the layout of our ancestral villages. Others put their memories into books, written mostly in Armenian, describing village life before the genocide.

After a lifetime of wondering where we came from, my father, Jim, and his sisters, Elaine, Marion and Georgiana, decided to make a journey back to historic Armenia, a few hundred miles from the Iraqi border in eastern Turkey.

Their trip coincided with a flare-up of international tensions over a U.S. bill that would formally acknowledge the mass killings as genocide. The government of Turkey strongly denounced the bill, calling the movement’s efforts to recognize the killings as genocide “a systematic campaign of defamation carried out by Armenian lobbying groups.”

In Turkey, there was legislation enacted to prevent people from talking about it, with the threat of prison to anyone who “publicly denigrates Turkishness, the Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey.” The Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk was subsequently charged for saying that 1 million Armenians had been killed in Turkey, though the charges were later dropped.

For my family, the situation only added to the expectation that the trip would be a tough one, on many levels. But as “A Family Erased” shows, what they found in the eyes of the Turkish children surprised them, on a journey that would change their lives forever.

Today I want introduce to all to a brilliant author of 15 novels, including the New York Times bestsellers, The Night Strangers, Secrets of Eden, Skeletons at the Feast, The Double Bind, Before You Know Kindness, and Midwives. The Night Strangers paperback arrives on April 24, 2012.

Chris Bohjalian

Chris Bohjalian wrote a novel on the armenian genocide, which comes out july 17. I can’t wait to read it!

” I knew almost nothing about my grandparents’ story. But that picture reminded me of those moments when, as a child myself, I would sit on my grandfather’s lap or listen to him, enrapt, as he played his beloved oud. I recalled the wondrous aroma of lamb and mint that always wafted from their front door when I would arrive, and my grandmother’s magnificent cheese boregs. I thought of their library filled with books in a language—an alphabet—I could not begin to decipher, even as I was learning to read English.” – Chris read the rest here Armenian Weekly

The Sandcastle Girls

” Over the course of his career, New York Times bestselling novelist Chris Bohjalian has taken readers on a spectacular array of journeys. Midwivesbrought us to an isolated Vermont farmhouse on an icy winter’s night and a home birth gone tragically wrong. The Double Bind perfectly conjured the Roaring Twenties on Long Island—and a young social worker’s descent into madness. And Skeletons at the Feast chronicled the last six months of World War Two in Poland and Germany with nail-biting authenticity. As The Washington Post Book World has noted, Bohjalian writes “the sorts of books people stay awake all night to finish.”In his fifteenth book, The Sandcastle Girls, he brings us on a very different kind of journey. This spellbinding tale travels between Aleppo, Syria, in 1915 and Bronxville, New York, in 2012—a sweeping historical love story steeped in the author’s Armenian heritage, making it his most personal novel to date.When Elizabeth Endicott arrives in Syria, she has a diploma from Mount Holyoke College, a crash course in nursing, and only the most basic grasp of the Armenian language. The First World War is spreading across Europe, and she has volunteered on behalf of the Boston-based Friends of Armenia to deliver food and medical aid to refugees of the Armenian genocide. There, Elizabeth becomes friendly with Armen, a young Armenian engineer who has already lost his wife and infant daughter. When Armen leaves Aleppo to join the British Army in Egypt, he begins to write Elizabeth letters, and comes to realize that he has fallen in love with the wealthy, young American woman who is so different from the wife he lost.Flash forward to the present, where we meet Laura Petrosian, a novelist living in suburban New York. Although her grandparents’ ornate Pelham home was affectionately nicknamed the “Ottoman Annex,” Laura has never really given her Armenian heritage much thought. But when an old friend calls, claiming to have seen a newspaper photo of Laura’s grandmother promoting an exhibit at a Boston museum, Laura embarks on a journey back through her family’s history that reveals love, loss—and a wrenching secret that has been buried for generations.”

Make sure you join his Facebook page to check out and read about his latest 🙂 I will be blogging about his book once I read it to give my personal opinion as well!

Tomorrow on April 24 I am going to march for “For every man, horse shoes nailed to his feet, forced walk the dusty road towards his own crucifixion For every woman, penetrated by a gendarme’s bayonet, barbarically violated and left to die , For every child, forced on to a crowded vessel, drowned in the Black Sea, drowned in the Tigris, waters turned red. For every baby, tiny body injected with morphine, future callously extinguished ” Robert Kazandjian and going to tweet with #ArmenianGenocide Hashtag . and try to make trending topic.